lifeguardasleep's Journal

lifeguardasleep's Journal - LiveJournal.com

Did you ever close your eyes and felt like "hundreds of couloured balloons float down from the ceiling - it instantly feels like a very Special Day to You - You feel like you're part of something very special"? That's what a HUG DAY feels like.

You're lucky: Tomorrow (Now in some parts of the world) is Ubuntu's HUG DAY. If you ever thought of contributing, to do nothing complicated, just help out a bit. This is the right time.

And this time it will be big, because some of Ubuntu's initiatives will be there too. So if you're familiar with either

the GNOME desktop

packages of the MOTU science team

the KDE world

Firefox

or X.org

or any other part of Ubuntu

and want to help one of those teams out, people will be there to help you get going.

If you want to make Ubuntu Dapper a better release, it will be easy for you, this is a good introductory read.

Will have the full 24h Live Session on #ubuntu-bugs on irc.freenode.net!

We're going to switch to Malone as our only bugtracker soon. Although the bug information will be preserved and Bugzilla's data fed into Malone, we shall have a Bug Day to give us a head start and make sure we're in good shape for the switch. If you want to help us clean the dust a bit, Wednesday, 11th of January is your day!Bug triage is boring, right?You always wanted to be part of an Ubuntu team, but didn't find the right one? You think looking at bugs is complicated, mind-boggling and doesn't make a change? You think it's annoying and tedious?Bug Triage in Ubuntu is different. It's fun! Why? Because along with the boring categories open bugs that have no input since 6 monthsUPSTREAM bugsUNCONFIRMED bugsNEEDINFO bugs everybody else has, we have much more exciting ones as well:From the Upstream developers talking categorythe Confidential information or something categorythe WTF?! categorythe early days categorythe Mr. Teacher, will we all fail this year? categoryIf this makes bug triage more exciting to you, but you don't know what you should do on Wednesday, 11th of January, look at this. We'll be at #ubuntu-bugs on irc.freenode.net all night and day and rock the show together with YOU.[...]

For Christmas I was in Trier (at my parents place) and met a huge bunch of old friends. Christmas seems to be the perfect time to meet people from school at random. Although I worked from there (3 or 4 days), I managed to get home at 5 in the morning at a couple of nights still.On the 26th I went back to Berlin via Mainz, to collect Nicole, who wanted to celebrate New Year in Berlin. Driving through the Hunsrück (a low mountain range), it was already snowing like mad and some people in front of me didn't manage to go up the hills. The hired car didn't let me down. YAY! After having been near Mainz the navigation system decided to route us through various little villages in Eastern Germany (we heard of traffic jams and accidents in the radio later on). Glad to be back on the highway, we speeded up again. After some kilometers, we were getting mad over some guy taking up like five minutes to overtake another one, they both sprayed snow and water on our windshield and we were happy to overtake. Funnily enough this all happened near 'Eisleben', which could be translated to 'ice live' or something. At a speed of 140 km/h, I felt that the car broke away slightly because the street was covered in ice, I managed to keep it steady and slowed down carefully, but after some split seconds a car appeared in front of me, I had to avoid another car and so we were turning around madly. The street was in a slope, so it took some very exciting seconds for us to stand still again. Not only didn't we hit another car, we didn't hit the crash barrier as well. The best thing (I couldn't remember it afterwards) was, that I said: 'Just keep cool.' to Nicole while this all happened. We drove to the side and talked to other people, who just stopped and had witnessed the scene. One of them landed in the ditch and had some nasty dents in his car. We all felt like having had our 2nd birthday.On the whole way back to Berlin we were a bit more careful and saw quite a lot of cars who landed on top or had just crashed. I'm truly grateful nothing happened to us.The following days were really nice and on New Year's Eve we celebrated with a couple of friends, Daniel Elstner among them. My brother showed up too, and it was a big surprise to see him, because he told me he had to work that evening, I was very happy. He also took a lot of pictures.Although I just managed to buy the ingredients some minutes before the shops closed, I made Wantans and duckling breast in red curry that evening. It felt great to be cooking again, but I didn' think of making pictures. :-)When the fireworks started, it was growing louder and louder and Thomas (my brother) managed to do some great pictures. This was my hour. Since it was loud anyway, I didn't mind to turn up the music and give a display of the new hobby, I have since two-three months. I took my Drum'n'Bass records and although I was a bit drunk, I managed to play quite well.I used to buy records and play them (only a few times), some 8 or 9 years ago and the itch never left me. So when I walked through Berlin, I rediscovered that idea and went into the next record store, after I felt lost for some minutes, I enjoyed myself quite a lot. In the meantime, I practised in some of my free time and it's been an excellent form of relaxation to me. So if you're looking for somebody to play some nice tunes in your club for two hours or something, drop me a mail and I'll send you a demo tape.At four or five we all went to bed. It was great.[...]

I have never been happier to see the Ubuntu community grow around me.The MOTU team is rocking hard as ever, pushing changes into Ubuntu's Universe and at the same time re-evaluating work flows, processes and the way to look at things. This is very important to me, because it means that this team is not fixed and immobile but copes with new challenges nicely. In a quick session, we decided that REVU should send out mails on a mailing list (as a quick fix until REVU2 is there) - this will speed up our general work flow impressively. We will be able to get reviews done quicker (teaching effect) and packages in quicker (BLING effect). In other news, we're currently discussing how to achieve an Open MOTU Day, which will hopefully make it easier for people to join the ranks.The Media team had its first meeting and after it we're sure Media support in Ubuntu will be better and the development of it more focussed. On a side-note Testing was mentioned as the key to a better state of applications in general. I'd really like to invite you to help testing Ubuntu and make Dapper the best release the world has ever seen. This page has instructions on what to do and where to start. (It will soon contain media-related tests as well.)Speaking of Testing: the result of serious testing are detailed, separate bug reports. Our bug team got more and more active in the last weeks and we want to have you all joining in our Pre-Christmas Clean-Up, the HUG DAY on December, 21st. We want to drive them regularly, so we help sustain our Bug Team, which works across Team Borders - as you can see: the Kubuntu, Desktop, MOTU teams are all in this together. If you like the idea and want to read a bit more about what's going on, head over here.The Desktop Team are doing an awesome progress and the Ubuntu Desktop News give a colourful piece of evidence. An awesome observation to make is that in a nice atmosphere contributions bring on more contributions: Ubuntu Desktop News in Brazilian Portuguese.I personally always admired the efforts of one team in Ubuntu: the Doc Team. The team was not necessarily one of the most natural developments, but still: there here and they do an incredible job. If you want to help them, read this announcement: we're trying to always get in the newest bits of documentation so you can enjoy it, look at it and if you find a way to put it better, they'll be happy to accept your contributions. Test the Docs!Another team getting off the ground is the Accessibility Team. Together we are roughly getting an idea, of what problems in Ubuntu's Accessibilty features are and we're trying to test and improve them as good as we can. We already made contacts with other teams and if you want to get involved, we're happy to see you with us.I'm very happy to be part of all this and to see new ideas and new developments emerging around me and thanks to the FRIDGE editors for mirroring this out into the world. :-)[...]

A bit overenthusiastic, I announced the Ubuntu bug day for tomorrow. We will rather meet on Thursday, November 24th in #ubuntu-bugs on IRC and if you ever wanted to know, how a Ubuntu HUG day feels, be sure to read this beforehand. See you around!

Matthias Klose (doko) and I did the Ubuntu booth at Berlinux. Our booth was crammed between the GNOME and the Skolelinux one. Sven Herzberg (herzi) ran the GNOME one and was supported by Thomas Keup, who had the brilliant idea of running a coffee stand, which attracted quite a lot of people, who grabbed a Hoary CD with each coffee.

We didn't have any lazy minutes at all and were quite successful. People were excited about Ubuntu and Edubuntu (which we showcased too) and apart from old users enjoying Ubuntu and new users asking about Ubuntu, we had some queries about business questions.

On the first day (Friday) there were quite a lot of students and people from the other stands; on the second day we had families and business people on both of those days. It was nice to see that 12 year old kids were interested and 70+ people too. Although our talk (slides here) was at 17:00 on Saturday we had around 60 people in the talk, some of which were interested in Berlin local activities, one interested in getting new sounds into Ubuntu and one new Desktop Team player.

The whole two days were exhausting but very funny, we had fun with the Debian, the GNOME, the KDE guys, the Skolelinux guys and many more. I'm glad we were there and with some more local involvement, we'll be up to forming a LocoBerlin too.

I'm in Berlin since three weeks now and I can't get enough of it. It's where I always wanted to live and it's even better than I imagined: there are countless extraordinary bars and restaurants - each of which you could put into a random city and it'd be the city's place to be. Food and beverages are cheap: I had the most delicious pizza for 1,60€.But there's more than that: apart from special places (like bars at the dock of the bank with raft-like places to sit in the sun, jamaica-like beach bars, charming parks with people from nearly every subculture), the most unusual things happen: just today, when I walked out with Murphy along the Paul-Lincke-Ufer (watching the sun bathers, people having breakfast, some guys playing boule), I saw a guy taking four parrots for a ride - he had them sitting on the handle bar of his bike. A week ago there was a "fight" between Kreuzberg and Friedrichshain. In the morning I already saw people in garbage sacks and when I had had dinner in a superb Indian restaurant, I saw some more of those guys, covered in dirt and some police cars approaching; when I heard a roar of jubilation, I thought I'd check. I paid and on the Oberbaumbrücke (it's exactly between Friedrichshain and Kreuzberg) there were two fighting groups wearing protective clothing (garbage sacks) and some had swords of a foamed material and shields they made out of election posters. They threw at each other whatever was in there reach, mostly fruit, half sacks of flour - the noise and the smell was overwhelming but everybody enjoyed the "fight". Each groups' goal (which consisted of people from all kind of age groups and subcultures) was to fight the opposing group back into their district. Kreuzberg lost and a guy, who could have been my dad, told me (littered as he was) that was due to the Friedrichshainer's use of illegal "weapons" and sure enough, I saw them throwing apples and potatoes, which, erm, might really hurt. "Keiner ist gemeiner, als der Friedrichshainer." I learnt that day. (In german, It rhymes and means "nobody's meaner than somebody from Friedrichshain".) It was big fun, even the policemen were as calm as I never saw policemen before - everybody enjoyed himself/herself and this is happening twice a year.Friday night, I had a long walk and I guess Murphy didn't agree with me on the length, but in like three hours, I went past all this: Kreuzberg Museum, Axel-Springer-Haus with ads for the Bild newspaper *vomit* (they filmed a scene over there, the amount of artificial light in the night and rain was impressive), Checkpoint Charlie, Friedrichsstraße, Gendarmenmarkt (with a most exquisite chocolaterie), Unter den Linden (where I went past (this, this, this, this and many other things), I payed a brief visit to the Museumsinsel, went over to the Oranienburger Strasse, where the sheer amount of hip cocktail bars drove me mad - the atmosphere I sensed there almost seven years ago was a completely different. Only Tacheles remained as it always was. I had a beer, walked back to Hackesche Höfe, had a bratwurst, walked over to the Alex and took the underground back home. It was simply charming to see all of these places, not as a tourist hopping off a bus and driving to the next place, but closely connected. It's like parts of a mosaic find together. Maybe that was the point, when I finally realized, I had moved to Berlin, that I finally was there.[...]

I finished my studies! WOOHOO! After long nights of fixing it all up for the presentation, I nearly didn't sleep at all and was WAY nervous at the presentation itself. Michael Vogt can tell, because he played host to me, while I prepared the presentation and watched my performance. I even forgot to get rid of the gum I was chewing to reassure myself. OUCH!

Nevertheless the professors liked my ideas and the concept VERY MUCH and gave me an 1.3 - which is a 95% grade.

I'm free!

Yesterday, I had a nice evening with Martijn van de Streek, Matthias Klose and Daniel Elstner - it seems the summer began, when I arrived here. Now I already enjoyed two days in Berlin which proved, how right I was to go there. Exploring Berlin, all the parks, interesting streets, I felt that Life is very kind to me.

I'm sitting in middle of half-packed moving boxes, dirt and dust everywhere and millions of things are still lying around. I'll get my stuff to BERLIN tomorrow - I'm so glad I finally managed it. The time in Dortmund was dominated by the last phase of my studies and usually lots of work, but still I got to know so many charming and important people, I will never forget and I'm sure I'll see all of them occasionally.

I always felt a big, magical love for Berlin and I very much look forward to finally being there. I'll be there from early September on, so if you want to go out for a beer, sign GPG keys or anything else, drop me a line. Living there will be great and I look forward to accomplishing my next adventure.

I handed in my thesis yesterday and it felt incredibly good to finally have reached another milestone. The next days will be quite hectic, since I will have to move, work on another project with my dad, prepare the "defense of my thesis" and actually defend it.

The MOTU crowd is currently in the middle of the review day and I'm glad to announce REVU - the next generating, rocking tool which will make the package review process alot easier.

Thank you, Reinhard Tartler and everybody else who was involved. You guys absolutely rock! I really love the way dynamic way in which the whole MOTU landscape evolves and it's incredible to be part of all this.

I've not been visible to quite a lot of people in the last weeks. To everybody who doesn't know yet: "I'll be back, really! I'm just busy with my last exam, my thesis, my move and then we'll all be happy".

It's the first time in my life I needed a half-weekly plan and I guess every project manager would be happy to see a 20-week-long-colorcoded piece with 35 goals on it. Some of them are already very explicit and quite easy to achieve, some just say something like "server network", which makes me cry silently into my sleep.

But anyway, after I wrote my exam on July, 8th, handed my thesis in on August, 18th and did a presentation on a date yet-to-be-fixed, I'm going to leave Dortmund. Yes, Berlin has been my dream destination for months and I'm very happy to be there soon. Looking at maps and appartment descriptions soothes me and already feels like holidays to me. I visited Berlin very often and the constant feeling of "Wow! You could live here!" on top of Berlin's diversity never left me. Funnily enough there's a series in a german news magazine, where young people from Britain describe their view of Germany. Three of the winning articles depict Berlin from different perspectives (two ofthem are in English). Feel free to visit me ... once I'm there.

I have nearly given up hope on another front, but: "Please: If you have still a book, a CD, a DVD or whatever of mine. I just lent that to you, to make the world a better place. Please visit me, have a cup of tea or coffee and give it back." Thank you.

... is the hero of the day. At least I hope so. While I'm out and be sunbathing... *cough* I mean reading up on interesting stuff for my thesis, my box will be busy compiling a new, patched xorg. If Roderich really managed to fix the accidental sending of half-finished mails, closed terminals, and everything else mentioned in bug 10942 in Breezy... JOY! HAPPYNESS!

Roderich: concluding from your mail adress you're working at Siemens: if a pay rise should ever be in question, judging from 10942's CC list, there will be quite a lot of people who will happily join the naked dancing in front of your boss... me included!

Nice to see roozbeh now is on Planet GNOME. When I began learning Persian, I immediately looked up, who did their translations and was astounded, when I learnt that nearly all but the KDE ones were done by him.

Unfortunately, I just manage to know the dirty words, which is not of any help when translating GNOME.

I do hope, Iranian people will discover the delights of Rosetta and help him out.

Apart from the MOTUs taking care of different parts of the Universe, we already have very eager and active new people in the crew; I'd like to mention Jorge Bernal, Hervé Cauvelier and Michael Rimbert, with whom I worked most of all. Go MOTUs!

Oliver works on a T-Shirt for us, so people will actually know, who compiled their packages! ROCK!